Missions with planes are nippy - you speed into conflict and can just launch another wave of fighters when you accidentally crash into an incoming Zero - but the ships are a different matter entirely. Ships handle precisely like you’d imagine several thousand tons of steel, rivets and seamen would. Since there has to be time for tactical positioning before a conflict, replaying a level involves an extended period of drumming fingers.

Things regularly go wrong, both in terms of attrition and catastrophic failure. In the former case, damage to your ship adds up to the point where the final encounters in the extended no save-game battles can be simply impossible, requiring a restart. In the latter, no matter how well you’re doing, a couple of torpedoes in the correct place can still turn you from a terrifying cruiser to a glorified aquarium toy for lucky deep-sea fish.

But Midway isn’t really about how its individual units work. It’s about combined arms, and the moments when you skip from the command deck of your aircraft carrier, deciding what array of torpedo boats, dive-bombers and fighters you want to put in the air, to actually controlling those fighters - before switching to a destroyer hunting a sub, then to a sub hunting a battleship, then to a battleship unleashing its ludicrous array of guns at a distant carrier, to your own fighters chasing dive-bombers on their final run to... well, whatever. At its best, Battlestations: Midway is totally dizzying in the best way.

While the AI is more than capable of carrying out your orders - in fact, some of us found the game easier if we never left the command screen - but you’ll generally want to go hands-on, skipping between what you consider the vital parts of the battle. If there’s a task you don’t find interesting, just leave it to the computer. Even more so if there’s a task you’re truly bad at. You’ll still do one hell of a lot of vehicle-switching, and it’s to the game’s credit that it’s rarely confusing. If you do get lost, a swift retreat to the map screen to consider the lay of the land soon puts you back on track.